BERNER SYMPHONIEORCHESTER & ENSEMBLE NIKEL - HEBREW SOUNDS
Programme Bern:
Luigi Nono: ‹Incontri for 24 player› (1955)
Chaya Czernowin: ‹Zohar Iver› (Blind radiance) for ensemble and orchestra (world premiere)
Joseph Tal: Symphony No. 1 (1953)
Ernest Bloch: ‹Schelomo›. Hebrew Rhapsody for cello and orchestra (1916)
Arnold Schönberg: ‹A Survivor from Warsaw› op. 46 for narrator, male choir and orchestra (1947)
Programme Basel:
Luigi Nono: ‹Incontri for 24 player› (1955)
Chaya Czernowin: ‹Zohar Iver› (Blind radiance) for Ensemble and Orchestra (world premiere)
Joseph Tal: Symphony No. 1 (1953)
Ernest Bloch: ‹Schelomo›. Hebrew Rhapsody for cello and orchestra (1916)
The concert in Basel will be staged by the basel sinfonietta as the second subscription concert.
Bern Symphony Orchestra
Alexander Kaganovsky (cello)
Ensemble Nikel: Vincent Daoud (Sax), Yaron Deutsch (E-Gitarre), Tom De Cock (Perkussion), Reto Staub (Piano)
Concerts in Bern: Male choir of the Stadttheater Bern & Robin Adams (narrator)
Mario Venzago, musical director
The programme includes works from four important Jewish musicians: ‹A Survivor from Warsaw› is considered to be one of Arnold Schönberg's most expressive works and the text and music achieve a level of harrowing realism. It is one of the key and most widely acclaimed musicals dealing with the Holocaust.
The Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch was one of the first to draw on the rich heritage of Jewish-Liturgical music. In his Rhapsody ‹Schelomo› the solo cello provides the Old Testament King Solomon with a voice and holds a melancholy dialogue, during which the entire orchestra lights up in Late Romantic-Impressionist acoustic colours.
Josef Tal was also a master of imaginative instrumentation, as his first symphony impressively proves.
Audiences at CULTURESCAPES will be able to hear the latest orchestral work ‹Zohar Iver› by the sought after composer Chaya Czernowin. ‹The most beautiful thing in life is to look at the inner darkness ... Liveliness cannot be found in smoothness, in the place where you feel safe and secure, in the place where you can easily dream. I find liveliness in the intensity of life, and this is where I wish to be.› Chaya Czernowin (2005)
In this concert program Luigi Nono is the only non-Jewish composer. But by marrying Nuria Schoenberg, the daughter of Arnold Schoenberg, Nono came into close contact with Judaism and dealt with relevant issues in some works, such as with the Holocaust in ‹Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz› (1965).
